The FIFA World Cup 2018 will begin in June, providing a fantastic opportunity for brands to get closer to their audiences. That’s why I have invited Ana Lopez, Marketing and Communications Manager at Adsmovil, to talk about how brands can focus their digital advertising during the World Cup – VK. Why is the World Cup such […]

The FIFA World Cup 2018 will begin in June, providing a fantastic opportunity for brands to get closer to their audiences. That’s why I have invited Ana Lopez, Marketing and Communications Manager at Adsmovil, to talk about how brands can focus their digital advertising during the World Cup – VK. Why is the World Cup such […]

It’s no secret that technology is increasingly at the core of many products and services and as this proliferates, tech giants are getting into new businesses as well as into each other businesses. In this world, tech matters and so does brand and scale. Look at Facebook: • Its new Marketplaces product, where users can […]

It’s no secret that technology is increasingly at the core of many products and services and as this proliferates, tech giants are getting into new businesses as well as into each other businesses. In this world, tech matters and so does brand and scale. Look at Facebook: • Its new Marketplaces product, where users can […]

At Cisneros Interactive, under RedMas, we launched the first and only audio advertising network in Latin America and the United States Hispanic market, Audio.Ad. We did this because we are optimistic that users will increase their listening time on streaming services. Just like video/tv is seeing a monumental shift from Linear TV to video streaming […]

At Cisneros Interactive, under RedMas, we launched the first and only audio advertising network in Latin America and the United States Hispanic market, Audio.Ad. We did this because we are optimistic that users will increase their listening time on streaming services. Just like video/tv is seeing a monumental shift from Linear TV to video streaming […]

I recently read an article “Emerging Markets present a great opportunity for mobile and app advertisers. But how do you enter them” which contained some good data points which I will share with you (just the data pertaining to Latin America). Finally, there seems to be no secret to what many, including us at Adsmovil […]

I recently read an article “Emerging Markets present a great opportunity for mobile and app advertisers. But how do you enter them” which contained some good data points which I will share with you (just the data pertaining to Latin America). Finally, there seems to be no secret to what many, including us at Adsmovil […]

Victor Kong is the President of Cisneros Interactive, a division of Cisneros in charge of developing advertising businesses in Latin America, the US Hispanic market, and Spain. Cisneros Interactive’s portfolio consists today of RedMas, Adsmovil, Audio.Ad, Coyote Media House, IT Click Video, Native.Ad, and TailTarget Latino. With this portfolio, Cisneros Interactive is one of the leading companies in the digital advertising […]

Victor Kong is the President of Cisneros Interactive, a division of Cisneros in charge of developing advertising businesses in Latin America, the US Hispanic market, and Spain. Cisneros Interactive’s portfolio consists today of RedMas, Adsmovil, Audio.Ad, Coyote Media House, IT Click Video, Native.Ad, and TailTarget Latino. With this portfolio, Cisneros Interactive is one of the leading companies in the digital advertising […]

IPG’s Magna forecast reveal that TV advertising keeps on growing in 2016 and then stabilizes in 2017. In fact, given some issues with Online Video’s scale and viewability, some advertisers have a renewed interest in TV’s ability to reach a mass audience.

If you analyze the above graph and you overlay this graph with Time Spent for each media, it is understandable that PRINT (Newspapers and Magazines) has seen the most deterioration. In fact, it still overindexes vs. time spent on print and digital under-indexes, which is the driver for Print’s continued advertising decline and Digital’s rise.

Well, what about TV?
The graph below is clear:

Since 2012, all age groups except 50-64 have spent less time watching TV. Those ages 18-24 are seeing 30% less TV since 2012!

Another way of seeing this picture is that for Millennials (ages 14-23), only 49% of the time they watched movies or TV shows was on a television set.

Some may say that this not a big deal because in the end Content is King, and the TV companies own this content and they can make it available on other platforms. But ask any newspaper executive and she can tell you that a reader in print is worth many times over a reader in their online edition.

Cisneros has a long tradition in producing TV content and let me tell you that the monetization is very different when that content goes to a Broadcast channel than when it is seen on YouTube. Our content is viewed more than 30 million times on YouTube every month, but our annual revenue is minimal.

Moreover, digital advertising is extremely concentrated in two players: Google and Facebook. There is also another trend occurring which is the shift from web to mobile. In mobile advertising, the dominance of these two players is even stronger.

So TV companies are facing a myriad of challenges, despite the fact the Content is King:

Streaming Video: Live TV is increasingly around News and Sports – what about the other content? How will slimmer bundles hurt a programmer such as Viacom or Discovery (mostly general entertainment programming)?

Audiences move to digital: with their great content, they can capture these audiences but at what monetization rates?

Oligopoly: how can traditional TV content companies compete against Google and Facebook – it’s not just eyeballs, it’s a combination of data, scale, and technology

One thing is clear: there are no boring days for media executives!

Blocking ads on the Internet has become a digital trend in the last few years, worrying many publishers and advertising companies.

During 2015, the use of adblocking in mobile phones grew up to 90%. It is estimated that there are at least 419 million users using tools to block ads on their mobile devices.

I believe adblocking is really good for the industry, and I say this for three reasons:

1) As popularity increases the business relationship between the publicistaand the user will become more explicit. Why do I say this? Because users sometimes get annoyed reading ads and forget that the content they read for free is thanks to advertising. If everyone used adblockers, quickly, they will realize that no publisher will display their content for free. This has already started happening. Some adblockers allow publishers to hide its contents to the people who block their ads, but give the user the option of a) re-accept advertising to read the content or b) subscribe to Publisher paying a few dollars a month. This will work best when many people use adblockers. If only a few people use it, publishers will not be affected and certainly not change their business model, allowing some free -riders read its contents for free and without seeing advertising.

2) In another blog i wrote about the paradox of digital advertising, which is: more digital content consumed, more advertising inventory; reducing CPM because the supply is greater than demand for that inventory. With adblockers inventory could be reduced and become more valuable, because only users who want to receive publicity would be getting it. In theory, users will be willing to see advertising on sites that they actually want to read. This can create differentiation between publishers and increase their quality. Hopefully we can stop reading the “10 most popular positions of Kamasutra” or “5 different ways to eat an egg.

3) It is true that many companies are abusing users with invasive advertising and illegally tracking personal information. Adblockers are improving this user experience.

Finally, companies like Google, RedMas and Adsmóvil which are basically advertising intermediaries between the publisher and the advertiser, adblockers will not affect them. They will have fewer inventories to sell, but today inventory is more than enough; Premium inventory is what is missing. If one day there is really a shortage of inventory, prices would rise and I think these intermediaries would do the same volume of business selling less inventory at a higher price.

Like many other measures, that sometimes have a counterintuitive effect, adblocking can be very good for publishers and the digital advertising industry.

This article is really not an informational piece. It’s my opportunity to vent and to take revenge on all the nay sayers I encountered so many times during my career in digital advertising.

When I started working in what was called the “Internet” most of my friends did not understand how these companies would make money. At Terra in 2001 it was still early days and popular belief was “proven” correct when the stock market burst. However, the “internet” continued to plough forward. Today, Google is the 2nd most valuable company in the world, and Facebook is worth the same as the following companies combined: Disney, 20th Century Fox, News Corp, Time Warner, Viacom, CBS, and Discovery!

In 2007 I was the Managing Director for MySpace Latin America, and I remember very well what the popular reaction was:

a) No brands would want to advertise in UGC (User Generated Content). Many agencies and industry journalists reminded us that in Brazil a pet food company advertised in Orkut (at that time the leading social media platform in Brazil) and the ad was placed in a user’s profile which advocated killing dogs and cats. That served as an example that these platforms were a dangerous place for brands.

b) In Mexico journalists wrote that users should not use social media platforms because kidnappers were using Facebook and MySpace to track where rich kids were going to, increasing the risk of getting kidnapped.

At MySpace, as the first social network to start selling ads in the region, we evangelized this media and after two years we sold less than US$5M in ads. Little did we know that we were paving the way for Facebook, which my guess is that they sell US$800M – US$1B in Latin America today.

And finally, when we launched Adsmovil in 2012 at Cisneros Interactive we visited ad agencies, even in the US Hispanic market where smartphone penetration was about 40%, and were told that they knew some Hispanics were consuming media on the phones but they had no budget for mobile advertising. At the same time, many experts and journalists were writing that the small screen on the phones made ads very ineffective. We countered with the fact that there was only one ad per screen vs. multiple ads in a webpage, and higher CTRs proved this point. No one was really listening to us at that time. Pandora saw its usage migrate to mobile and many analysts predicted its demise given that they could not monetize as well on mobile as they did on web. However, mobile made usage on Pandora explode and Pandora in 2015 had revenues of $1.2B. In May 2015, Google had more searches on mobile than on desktops and in the last quarter Google announced that its YOY revenues increased 17% , mostly due to mobile advertising.

So today no one doubts that digital advertising is a real business, no one questions advertising on UGC content, and mobile marketing which was so foreign in 2012, is a given in 2016.

So what’s next?

These days I am evangelizing three new products:

Data: we invested in a JV with Tail Target, Brazil’s leading DMP and Data Provider

Influencer Marketing: FLUVIP has a fantastic platform which automates many steps in influencer marketing

Audio Advertising: At RedMas we launched Audio.Ad, the first and only audio ad network

Honestly, no one is saying we are crazy this time, but advertisers are not jumping at these opportunities as they should.

Data: I am surprised that advertisers are not taking advantage of the incredible data that is now available to improve targeting their consumers and to better understand their current users

Influencer Marketing: I’ve heard more than once that planning a campaign with influencers is very time consuming, and in some cases that influencers did not post what they had to after they were paid

Audio: now this one is incredible – some agencies are saying that users cannot click on an audio spot. Can you click on a TV or Radio spot, in a print ad, in an OOH ad?

However, this time I am patient; I know that time has a funny way of changing perceptions! As with my earlier examples, I will one day shout with enthusiasm: “See, I was not that crazy after all!”

For those who travel frequently and like to exercise, I have to tell you that my town, Montevideo, is a runner’s paradise. Where else can you run most of the year in 60-70 degree weather, little humidity, and more importantly, in a beach right along the water? The beach is also perfect for running – almost isolated with hard sand, no pollution, and with a nice breeze to cool you off. If you run early in the morning you can see the sunrise and its reflection on the sand and the calm waters. You can also run inches from the slow breaking waves. Montevideo is the only capital in the Americas where you can do this.

New York has Central Park, Mexico City Bosques de Chapultepec, Buenos Aires Bosques de Palermo, and Sao Paulo Ibirapuera. Montevideo does not have those urban sprawling parks, but it has miles and miles of open beaches. The photo below is of the beach in the Carrasco neighborhood, which is only 10 mins away from Pocitos where our RedMas office is located.

Carrasco’s beach on the River Plate

The beach in Pocitos, one block from our office is also gorgeous (just a little bit more crowded, with softer sand, and shorter).

The famous Rambla in Pocitos

So next time you come to Montevideo, pack your running gear. You won’t regret it! Oh, and besides the beaches, Montevideo has a nice and growing tech scene as well. More on that later…

I recently wrote about Millennials to clarify some myths about this demographic group. Now, upon reading Nielsen’s “Q4 2015 Total Audience Report”I realize that the term Millennials, when used to represent a monolithic group is completely wrong. I wrote that Millennials range in age from 15-35 years old and these years are transformative in the life of a person. It spans adolescence to parenthood for example. Therefore referring to all this age group as one monolithic group does not make a lot of sense from a marketing perspective.

Nielsen’s report, lends credence to what I am saying. Nielsen segments Millennials into three groups based on their life stages:

Dependent Adults (living in someone else’s home)

On Their Own (living in their own home without children)

Starting a Family (living in their own home with children)

Nielsen then tracks their media consumption and use of technology and notice significant differences within Millennials based on their life stages. Here is a summary of their findings:

For example, there is a huge difference in the use of Netflix and other similar subscription-based video on demand services. On Their Own Millennials use this service significantly more than the other groups (78% vs. 64% for Dependent Adults and vs. 58% for those Starting a Family). And you can see that TV and Radio consumption as well as Usage of Digital Devices also vary based on your life phase.

So my whole point is why do we continue using the term Millennials? – there is ample proof that lumping a 15 year old with someone who is 34 and married is very different.

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